𝗔𝗖𝗘𝗗 𝗢𝗨𝗧! | bokuto kōtarō

𝗢𝗡𝗘 // an impossible problem

WEAKNESS #1
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❝ He's hard to pin down. ❞

☾ 𓅓

THERE ARE INFINITE numbers between 0 and 1.

The difference seems small, but let's take 0.9 for example.

And just a bit larger than that is 0.99.

Then, there's 0.999.

You can keep going, and yet, you can never quite reach an end to those possibilities.

Closer and closer, and still so far away with infinite space in between.

Maybe "some infinities are bigger than other infinities," as many would like to quote, but I think that the distance from 0 to 1 and 0 to 1,000,000 are the same.

Although that may be a confusing conjecture to wrap your head around, I suppose that's the beautiful mystery of infinity — what appears to be insignificantly small holds just as much value as something a million times its magnitude.

A lot of people believe that math exists only in black and white, yes and no, true and false, but I think of it as more like the process of shrinking down the countless possibilities to a certain, calculable range. Sometimes, you even get down to a single number.

You turn "infinite" to "definite."

For the majority, it's probably not as interesting as art, literature, and history, but to me, math is a language to understand reality a little bit more than before, and it's a code we have yet to decipher entirely.

Sure, it can be exhausting, confusing, and frustrating.

"One minute remaining!"

A problem can leave you totally clueless — completely at its mercy — and working it out can force you to wring all of your brain's power to even understand where to begin.

"Thirty seconds!"

Small mistakes can generate errors, leading you in the opposite direction. Your answer box is once again full of eraser shavings and faded pencil marks. You're stumped as to where you've gone wrong, and you start all over again, endure a bit longer, crease your brow with more wrinkles — and then, you hear a click.

Suddenly, you've been possessed by Archimedes and you're jumping out a mid-200 B.C. bathtub, screaming, "Eureka!" You've got it.

Math makes me look forward to those "Eureka!" moments a lot.

"Time's up! Pencils down."

Because there isn't anything quite like the satisfaction of finally understanding a problem you once thought was impossible to solve.

"Aw, shit," Mitsu exhaled and brought her head down to her desk as soon as she passed her quiz to me. "I totally forgot to add constants to those antiderivative questions. I'm so losing points — if I even get any."

"I'm sure you'll get credit," I tried to reassure her.

Not too long afterwards, Fujiwara-kun faced me with a helpless expression. "I didn't know we had to memorize and write down actual rules..."